


Wonderful Things

by Setcheti



Category: Matilda - Roald Dahl
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 13:08:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5498108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world. But how we decide to change it is up to us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderful Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hollimichele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/gifts).



> A fluffy little Yuletide treat for someone who wanted a look into Matilda’s future.

Matilda Honey – formerly Matilda Wormwood, once upon a time but thankfully not anymore – came home from school in a mood that quite literally made the furniture shake when she entered the house. In spite of the mood, however, she did not slam the door behind her, or stomp her feet, or throw her bookbag into a corner as hard as she could even though she really wanted to do all of those things. Instead she closed the door and latched it for the night, hung up her coat and took off her shoes on the mat because it had been muddy on the walk home from the bus stop, neatly placed her bookbag on the painted chair by the coatrack, and then went into the kitchen to get a drink. Her mother was there, already making supper because Matilda was home late, and one look apparently told her it had been a bad day because she stopped what she was doing to give her daughter a hug. Matilda returned the hug, got a drink of water, and then put the glass in the sink and went down the hall to the Calming Room to do her exercises. She didn’t really want to do them, but she was so keyed-up she felt like she was jangling inside and so she knew she needed to do the exercises regardless of whether she wanted to or not.

The Calming Room wasn’t as plain and dull as its name might have implied – on the contrary, it was full of light and color and lovely things, and its single large window looked out onto a beautiful garden. There was a sturdy little worktable in the Calming Room, and a comfortable soft chair, and a tall stool in case the chair was too soft and comfortable, and on one wall were square little cubbies containing clay and paper and all in a manner of interesting craft materials. Matilda considered the soft chair for a moment, then huffily hopped up onto the tall stool instead and glared at one cubby; a stack of paper squares tied with a ribbon came out and settled itself on the table, and then the ribbon untied itself and floated to the side of the cubbies to neatly drape itself over a dowel where many more lengths of pretty ribbon were already resting like a tired rainbow.

Ribbon safely stowed away, Matilda turned her attention to the stack of paper, making sure it was positioned just so. She floated the top piece off and laid it down at a precise angle, and then she started folding with methodical precision. The paper creased itself from left to right and top to bottom, and then from corner to corner, after which it folded itself into a diamond shape and the corners began folding in, folding out, and folding up and down until one final crease and then a tug on two corners at once put the finishing touches on a pretty paper crane. Matilda moved the crane to the right side of the table, floated up another piece of paper, and started folding again.

Now you may be wondering right about now exactly what would happen were someone to look into the Calming Room’s window and see all of this going on, and the answer is: Nothing, because it wouldn’t be possible. The Calming Room’s large, pretty window looking out onto the perpetually sunny, flowery garden was a clever painted illusion; the room did have a window, an average-sized one, but it was protected by shutters on the outside and a thick curtain on the inside. The beautiful large sunny window was actually a window-sized painting in a wooden window frame, lit from behind with a string of fairy lights and decorated with delicate white curtains. Because every so often someone did walk by in the pretty wooded lane outside, and it wouldn’t have done at all for them to have seen Matilda doing what she was doing on the table from her seat on the stool in the center of the room. And most especially not on a day like today, when she was feeling very much out of sorts and might have taken being stared at quite badly.

Which could have made it a very bad day for the person doing the staring, because a teenage girl can be considerably more creatively vindictive than a six-year-old can be, and even at six Matilda had been pretty creative. Hence the Calming Room, and the exercises her mother had drilled her in, back when she’d had to use her hands to do them, back before puberty had brought Matilda’s miraculous ability to move things with her mind roaring back with a vengeance – something Jenny Honey had apparently expected to happen. “You're an exceptional child, and you can do wonderful things, Matilda,” her mother had told her. “But you could do horrible things too, without even meaning to, just because you were too angry or too frightened or too upset to think about the consequences of what you were doing. So what we’re going to do is practice doing wonderful things, every day, and if you start to feel very upset or angry, you’re to come into this room and close the door and do something wonderful to calm yourself down. Because you and I know there are plenty of horrible things and horrible people in the world already, and the last thing we want to do is make more to join them.”

Matilda had known that, and being very intelligent for a child of six she had almost immediately absorbed the lesson that was being presented to her: Feeling bad and acting badly do not have to go together, nor should they if it’s at all possible to prevent it. And so she had applied herself to learning the exercises her mother devised for her, and even suggested more as time went on. The paper cranes had been her mother’s idea, though. The exercise was to fold fifty perfect cranes, which would then be hung on knotted strings; once one thousand perfect cranes were hanging, she could make a wish. Her mother had told her that traditionally the wish was for peace in the world, and that many, many people all around the world did the same exercise in order to earn the right to make that wish. “So you see,” she’d said, “that’s the very best way to use your anger and frustration, don’t you think? You can use it to work for the wish, for the good of the whole world. And you don’t have to rush, because every day someone somewhere makes their thousandth crane and wishes for peace.”

“And the day I finish mine will be my day?” Matilda had wanted to know.

“The day you finish yours will be your day,” her mother had confirmed. “And we’ll make a cake to celebrate.”

That had been nine years and three cakes ago, and right now Matilda was somewhere around halfway to her fourth wish but – fortunately or unfortunately – closing in on it rather faster than she had done in the past. As a fifteen-year-old university student whose classmates were all much older than she was and whose friends were all still in secondary school, not to mention that she was currently going through an awkward phase development-wise, she felt very much like a fish out of water pretty much everywhere she went except home. Home in the lovely old red brick house tucked away in the hills with its pretty garden and honeysuckle by the gate and roses under the windows. Home with her sweet, kind mother, who was still a teacher at Crunchem Hall where Matilda and all of her friends had gone to primary school, and who still taught first-years to spell difficult words by having them memorize funny little poems. Home where Matilda felt loved and safe always.

Some days, Matilda wished she could just stay home forever. And whenever she wished that, she would go and get a hug from her mother, who would reassure her that everyone felt like staying home forever sometimes. Matilda knew her mother had probably felt that way a lot back in the days before she’d become Matilda’s mother, back when she had just been Miss Honey, a very poor teacher working at the school run by her horrible aunt, Miss Trunchbull. Her mother also assured Matilda that awkward phases don’t last, and that all flowers look a little funny while their petals are still half-furled and not quite ready to finish opening yet, but that a flower will only bloom when it’s time and not a second before. Her mother always seemed to know exactly the right thing to say, the right time to offer cocoa and cookies, the right time to suggest an hour of hard work in the garden instead, or the right time to just give a hug and not say anything.

The idea of growing up and moving away and leaving her mother was terrifying to Matilda. She flubbed a fold and unfolded the piece of paper with a sigh, smoothing it out and starting over again. She countered each unreasonable fear with a reassuring fact as she re-made each fold, the way she’d been taught to do. It would be years before she was ready to leave home, years before she was even old enough to need to think about it. Leaving wouldn’t mean losing her mother, even then. Her friends were still her friends, even though she was at university now and they weren’t and she didn’t get to see them very often. Her friends would be ready for their A-levels in another two years and then getting jobs or possibly coming to the university themselves, and then she’d be able to see them more often. They’d have lots of fun together – even more than they did now, because by then they’d all be adults. And someday she’d have her own little cottage, or maybe a little flat in the city, and it would be every bit as special as her mother’s lovely old red brick house was. Because love was what made a house a home, and the one thing her mother had taught Matilda over and above everything else was that love never leaves you even when the person who gave it to you isn’t there anymore.

The redone crane’s beak unfolded with a little twist in it, almost like he was smirking at her, and Matilda smiled and straightened it out before putting him with the others. Ten more to go, and then she’d hang the cranes on their string and go back out to set the table for supper. And hug her mother again, just because she could. Maybe this time when she made her thousandth crane she’d make a different wish, just this one time. Maybe this time she’d wish that she would grow up to be the same kind of wonderful, loving person Jenny Honey was – and the same kind of wonderful mother, too.

The world was always in need of more wonderful things, after all.


End file.
